XDA

Thoughts on politics, law, culture and guns from an eclectic, but mainly center-right point of view

Thursday, June 30, 2016

It Don't Add Up

The facts that the number of guns owned by American citizens has roughly doubled to over 310 Million* since 1993 and the number of homicides with guns has dropped by 50% during that same time period, spell doom for the gun haters' theory that we have to reduce the number of guns owned by citizens in order to reduce gun violence. It's the opposite. And because he's rather dim, our President has been one of the best gun salesmen ever in the past 8 years, responsible for probably 60 Million gun purchases just from his anti-gun rhetoric. People with common sense think: Maybe I ought to buy a gun now before the Government bans them. This state of affairs is disheartening to the anti-gun crowd so they try very hard to find a silver lining. Take this piece in the Washington Post today, for example.

Its author is thrilled by the idea that, according to polls, gun ownership is way down. One poll has gun ownership down from a high of 55% in 1994 to 36% in 2016. Hooray, the author strongly implies.

But hold on there, kitty cat. If the number of guns owned has doubled from about 150 million in 1993 to 310 million in 2016, virtually the same period as the decline in percentage of ownership, who owns the 160 million newly purchased guns? Not to fear, says the author, the newly purchased guns are owned by people who already own guns and are stocking up. Behold.

But the declining rates of gun ownership across three major national surveys suggest a different explanation: that most of the rise in gun purchases is driven by existing gun owners stocking up, rather than by people buying their first gun. A Washington Post analysis last year found that the average American gun owner now owns approximately eight firearms, double the number in the 1990s.

Other research bears this out as well. A 2004 survey found that the average gun owner owned 6.6 firearms, and that the top 3 percent of gun owners owned about 25 guns each. More recently, a CBS News poll taken in March of this year found that roughly 1 in 5 gun owners owned 10 guns or more.

OK, let's see if that works.

There are enough guns for each person in America if evenly distributed, but if only 36% of the population of 310 Million are gun owners, that's 111.6 Million gun owners. Let's pick the high number in the article of guns per owner (8 per owner-- we know that's not true, plenty of people own only one gun but let's use it anyway). That means there are on average there are 893 Million guns owned by citizens. But that's way too many. The 8 per owner figure is way too high. It's no better for 6.6 per owner. So the numbers are not working.

How about this for an explanation? The people recently buying guns are in some part, varying in each individual, buying a gun because of fear of a Government ban and/or confiscation. Those paranoid thoughts would probably cause the owners to hide the fact of ownership from the Government. So perhaps those polled recently are lying to the pollsters about gun ownership, for fear of being on a list of gun owners for the Government to use when it starts the confiscation.

It's a better explanation than what the WaPo yahoo comes up with.

* Some use the figure 350 Million and there is some reason to believe that but I'm conservative so I'll stick with the lower, settled-science number.

WaPo said 357 Million guns owned by civilians by the end of 2013. What's happened since then? In 2014 there were 21 Million applications for gun purchases, 23 Million in 2015 and 13 Million so far this year. So in the 2 and 1/2 years since we've reached 357 Million guns, 57 Million more have been purchases. That's a total of 414 Million guns in civilian hands now, according to WaPo writers and the FBI.

The household ownership polls are no more reliable than the Brexit polls. The drowning man is clutching at straw to believe them.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Some Essential Differences Between Right and Left

The Right is sure malum in se laws are just but is very suspicious of malum prohibitum laws. The Left is not so sure about malum in se laws but thinks malum phohibitum laws are hunky dory, as long as they get to say what is prohibited.

The Right's default political position is liberty -- is the law or policy or cultural norm focused on maintaining or providing freedom for the greatest number of people? The Left tells liberty to go sit at the back of the bus -- every law, policy or cultural norm they propose diminishes freedom for us, and that's the whole point.

The Right stands on principle for an ordered liberty and leaves the bulk of the policing to the individuals' self control. The Left is never satisfied with the amount of control it has over ordinary lives and is always seeking to demand or prohibit more behavior -- from shower flow, to toilet flow, to what lights we can use, to what we can throw away, to what we can or cannot eat, to what we can or cannot think or say. The Left rarely trusts the individual to make his or her own decisions.

The Right essentially wants to be left alone by the government. The Left supports an ever increasing, ever more intrusive government.

The Right thinks: Do just what you want so long as it doesn't deprive others of their rights and pursuits. The Left thinks: Everything not forbidden is compulsory.*

Some of the people on the Extreme Right are America's founding fathers: Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Mason, and Madison. Some of the people on the Extreme Left are Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Hitler.

The toll for political murder in the 20th Century by the Right barely cracks a hundred thousand. The toll for political murder in the 20th Century by the Left far exceeds a hundred million.

The Right thinks that what people earn is theirs and is outraged by the government taking more from the successful merely because it can. The Left is outraged that people want to keep what they've worked to obtain, and it wants to take ever more from the successful.

The Right trusts the unseen hands of the free market and thinks it has been the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The Right always wishes to unleash its potential for good, for wealth production, free from the strangling policies of the Left. The Left hates the free market and always seeks to consign the means of production to ever more government control. The Left ignores that government control of the markets and production always fails and results in extreme poverty and misery for the masses.

The Left believes the best social programs give to the unfortunate money taken by taxes and have government control of the program. The Right believes the best social program is a job.

The Right thinks that immigration into America should be used as a means for improving American and the lives of its citizens. The Right thinks that importing large numbers of people who have no desire to become Americans hurts the nation. The Left thinks the best immigration policy produces future voters for the Left.

Sunday, June 19, 2016

A Piece Crammed with Ignorance

Adam Gopnik has an anti-gun screed in the New Yorker which is above par in ignorance. Let's take a look.

So, yes, one person did do that, but it was a weapon that empowered him to do it—a weapon designed only for mass killing on the battlefield, a weapon so dangerous that soldiers keep their version locked up when not actually training with it, out of respect for its rapid-fire lethality, but a weapon that now, in Florida and elsewhere, can be placed freely and without constraints into the hands of almost anyone who wants one. The shooter in Orlando reportedly had, in addition to a handgun, a semi-automatic assault rifle in the general AR-15 family. (Press accounts indicate that it was a Sig Sauer MCX, or something very similar.) Such essentially military weapons—they come in many brands, with the minute distinctions among them a source of excitement to gun fetishists—were involved not only in Orlando but in many of the most recent major gun massacres, including San Bernardino, Newtown, and Aurora. (That we know what the names reference at once is in itself telling.) These are weapons, as one of the Newtown family lawyers put it after Orlando, “designed for the United States military to do to enemies of war exactly what it did this morning: kill mass numbers of people with maximum efficiency and ease.”

I'll start at the top. The Glock 17 and the SIG Sauer MCX used by the miserable Muslim puke to shoot a lot of people in the Pulse are not weapons designed only for mass killing in the battlefield. The Glock is an ordinary semi-auto pistol. The MCX is strictly semi-auto as well and actual battlefield self loading weapons are almost always full auto. Big difference. Gopnik is a fool not to know this yet to write about guns. It gets worse. Yes, soldiers lock up their weapons. All responsible gun owners do that. And we do it because all guns can be lethal. It's their essential nature. Singling out a semi-auto rifle that looks cool/lethal, is a sure-fire conversation stopper with someone with the slightest knowledge of weapons of war. As I've pointed out, the French police use a full-auto model of the little brown rifle made by Sturm Ruger. It looks like a hunting rifle. The semi-auto models (called the Mini-14 and Ranch Rifle) have never been banned nor have I ever heard anyone here call for their being banned. But they shoot the same round from the same size box magazine at the same exact rate as the scary rifles that were banned for 10 years to absolutely no benefit. The silence on the Mini-14 and the huge war of words against the AR-15 are further proof that the AR haters are too ignorant to engage in any useful conversation about guns. Haters got to hate.

Cosmetic features do not make a gun more lethal. If it's a gun, it's already lethal. So Gopnik dives headfirst into this shopworn meme--ban the mean looking guns. He's a tool. There's more, unfortunately, lots more. Gopnik seems amazed that the good people of the United States can actually purchase a weapon. 20 seconds reading and thinking about the 2nd Amendment ought to cure that amazement. I guess he's never done that. Also, Sig stands for Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, which is German for Swiss Industry, Inc. I use caps for all three acronym letters but you don't have to. Sauer (J. P. Sauer und Sohn, GmbH) is an old German manufacturer of high end guns (since 1791). The new composite company was started in 1985. They sell well designed, well made guns. It was indeed an MCX used and that gun is not an assault rifle (it's only semi-auto) nor has it anything to do with the AR-15 (except cosmetically). It was not designed for the US Military. The full-auto version I've seen plenty of Swiss soldiers carry around in town is the assault rifle. The MCX and the AR-15 are designed to put as many aimed shots down range as possible. It's primary use is to kill things, of course, and unfortunately that includes people. That they rarely are used to do that (less than 2% of murders are with self loading rifles in America, less than that in Switzerland) is testament to the stupidity of focusing on self-loading rifles, as Gopnik and his ilk are doing. Handguns are the guns which kill people in large numbers. Let's move on.

The blood lobby for guns [link disabled] insists that the weapon has nothing to do with the murderous act. This is a case in which there can be no room for doubt that the direct opposite is true.

OK, I'm waiting for the proof that the gun did the killing on its own and the murderous Muslim puke shooting it actually did nothing at all. Am I taking Gopnik too literally? The proof never comes.
The gist of his so called argument here is his belief in the efficacy of gun legislation.

As individuals we cannot protect ourselves from all crazed killers, whether theirs is the adopted ideology of religious fanaticism or the idiosyncratic obsession of a lunatic. But as a community we can keep guns from getting into their hands.

Really? So the murder statute was ignored over 50 times in Orlando but the prohibition of obtaining a certain type of gun would surely have been obeyed. Moral delusion and fantasy. He should know better.

If you are serious about stopping terrorism but not serious about keeping weapons of mass murder from the hands of those already identified as having ties to terrorism, then you are not serious about stopping terrorism.

That's pretty funny coming from a Democrat who clearly supports President Obama and praised him in this very article. There has been no president less interested in stopping terrorism than Obama. If we know you are a terrorist, you shouldn't be walking around at all, much less into a gun store. But it's the knowing and the slippery slope "ties to terrorism" that worries us on the right. It's the due process thing I wrote about here. The lefty, ignorant gun haters are all itching to go anti-Constitution, and deny some subset of our citizenry basic civil rights as a morally preening sign that they care. They want to ban guns mainly because, as gun haters, it won't effect them but will hurt those they see as the real enemy, law abiding gun owners. Too bad it won't effect those merely suspected of "ties to terrorism" either primarily because of the whole "due process" requirement to depriving people of their rights. It's the Democrats who like to round up identifiable racial groups and put them into camps, not the Republicans. (Although I know sufficient history to support the internment of the Japanese community on the West Coast for the first two years of the war). So if you're merely suspected of "ties to terrorism" the Democrats want to deprive you of your civil rights. Pretty much their whole history is doing just that. Way to let your fascistic roots shine through, Gopnik! I never doubted that you had them. He then pivots to former ACLU territory.

It is possible to argue that a “watch list” of this kind is dubious, in any case, on civil-liberties grounds—that it creates two classes of citizens, without an open process to adjudicate its fairness. But it is not possible to argue that, if we have such lists, they should be used to protect us from the plane hijackers we almost never encounter and not from the gunmen we so often do.

Good of you to notice the problems with what you propose, Gopnik. The real difference is prohibiting someone from getting on a plane and prohibiting that person from keeping and bearing arms is that one is not a God given right actually recognized and written down in the Constitution (and amendments thereto). That fact makes all the difference in the world.

Yes, of course, killings happen in other wealthy, supposedly peaceful countries, but nowhere with the ease and normalcy with which they happen here. The murders in Paris last fall were acts of Islamic terrorism undertaken on behalf of isis—and there is no reason not to call it Islamic terrorism or militant Islamism or anything else you like, just as there is no reason not to identify the politics in, say, a mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic as rooted in opposition to reproductive rights.

I'm not sure "ease and normalcy" are the right adjectives to use about murdering people. And our looking murderous in comparison to other countries certainly depends on which nations you pick for the comparison. Mexico and Russia and Venezuela are much more gun murderous than we are and they have very strict laws about private ownership of guns. I'm for calling Muslim terrorism, Muslin terrorism. Wonder why Gopnik's choice of president specifically and his political associates generally have such a problem saying those words. Oh, and the once a decade guy shooting an abortionist or at an abortion facility is not because the shooter opposes "reproductive rights." They hate the fact that innocent babies to be are being murdered, as they see it. Reproductive rights is a euphemism for abortion. Another term the left has difficulty saying.

The point is not to pin the tail on the ideology; it is to stop the killing from happening again. The Paris gun murders were carried out with difficulty, as the end result of a complex scheme involving many perpetrators—they were not, and still are not, part of the regular routine of French life. They couldn’t have been realized on impulse. We have allowed impulse massacres to become a continual and permanent fact of American life.

Does Gopnik have any idea the level of preparation the miserable puke who shot up the Aurora movie house put into perpetrating his crime? Ease, impulse. The mass murderers are the opposite of that, both here and in France. Fat lot of good the stringent gun control laws in France did. Gun control laws never prevent murderers from obtaining guns because the murderers don't obey them. Taking guns away only from the law abiding is stupid. We don't need to disarm them, they're not criminals and murderers. Something tells me Gopnik's big finish is his abiding belief, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that gun control laws stop crime and save lives. Let's see.

Once again, the overriding lesson, as settled as social science can ever be, remains: If we had gun laws like the gun laws of most countries that resemble ours, we would have lower levels of gun violence, as they do.

He went there and he even called it settled science. There are differing levels of violence in countries around the world. Some are law abiding and peaceful (I'm thinking particularly about the Japanese after we nuked them twice--they were pretty murderous for nine years before that unpleasantness), but you could say it about a lot of European countries and usually about former British colonies (except for us). It has absolutely nothing to do with gun laws. Switzerland and Israel have people walking around doing everyday things like shopping or getting on a train carrying full auto rifles and they have low gun murder rates. That's because the Swiss and Israelis are law abiding. It's not because they are denied guns by legal prohibition. Some of the most murderous countries have very strict gun laws and most of the worst don't allow private ownership certainly of handguns and most long guns as well. Just as it's the murderous heart of the shooter that causes gun murders everywhere, it is the culture of violence in the various countries that makes for the different gun murder rates. The gun laws do nothing because only the law abiding obey them. It continues to astound me that the Democrat gun haters can't seem to grasp this simple, established fact. Gopnik has proven he can't.

Saturday, June 18, 2016

Who Is Right?

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, formerly known as the CDC, keeps statistics on all deaths in America. The FBI keeps statistics on all crime in America. Here are their statistics for homicide and murder and non-negligent homicide for 2013.

The CDC has 16,121 homicides total that year with 11,208 by gun fire.

The FBI has 12,253 murders and non-negligent manslaughters total that year with 8,454 by gun fire

That's a big difference? How do we know who is right?

I can't and don't believe that there are nearly 4,000 negligent manslaughter victims each year, nearly 2,800 involving guns. Somebody is not being square with us.
I checked for 1993. That year the CDC had 39,393 gun deaths in America-- 19,213 suicides, 18,839 related to assault and 1,543 accidents. For the same year the FBI had 24,526 murders and non-negligent manslaughter cases in America. They didn't break it down more than that (at least I couldn't find any stats like that). So it's been the case that the stats don't agree but it used to be that the FBI had more homicides than the CDC and now it's the opposite.

Friday, June 17, 2016

Avoiding a Fair Debate

I keep picking on Nicholas Kristof for his screeds against guns because he keeps presenting stupid and bogus arguments. Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

First continuing mistake. He pads, with suicides, the gun death figures he uses in his arguments. This is mixing apples and oranges. Murders using guns is a problem both the left and right want to mitigate. Suicide is not a problem of violence against another. It is a shame and a tragedy and the loss hurts and haunts those who loved the dead person sometimes forever, But it is not an intrusion on the rights of others. Besides, lefties are generally pro-suicide and they push for laws that will allow other people to murder with impunity the infirm who want to but can't physically take the action to end their own lives. This is so dishonest in a discussion that is essentially about protecting people from murder.

Kristof also trots out the completely bogus figure of 40% of "gun transfers" don't involve a background check. He keeps saying this figure is from a Harvard study soon to be published, but it never is published. Getting the gun from the factory to the gun owner nearly always involves purchases and nearly all of them are completed with a background check. The transfers other than sales include "a gift, an inheritance, a swap between friends". This is a tiny subset of the millions of gun transferred by purchases each year. And the guns which are the gifts, inheritances or swap somehow got to the gift giver, decedent or swap partner from the manufacturer without any checking, right? Clearly wrong. So a legally obtained gun, almost certainly obtained through a background check, is transferred from the guy who passed the background check to someone whom he knows well enough to give gifts to or trade things with, or who is family. So this is a problem only if the good guy gun owners completely throw caution to the wind and give, swap or bequeath the gun to some criminal or crazy person or someone otherwise unable to pass a background check. I'm willing to bet that the number of risky transfers here is such a small number that it warrants not even a troubling thought much less a new law. We already have a law prohibiting giving or swapping or selling a gun privately to a person who cannot own a gun. That this law is so seldom enforced is most likely because good guy gun purchasers hardly ever break it.

Which brings us to the newer talking point: Let's not allow guns to be sold to people on the terror watch list or the no fly list or some secret list the Government generates. I and almost all gun nuts support not allowing terrorists to own guns. It's the list that is troubling. I think taking away an important civil right, the right to keep and bear arms, ought to involve some ordered mechanism for placing a name on the proposed, prohibiting list. The mechanism would have to include giving notice that you might be placed on the list, having the right to confront the people who want to put you on the list and making them prove, in front of a neutral magistrate, that there is sufficient evidence that you belong on the list and a right to have a meaningful appeal of that process. You know, due process (another right in the 5th and 14th Amendment). Kristof and his ilk apparently don't mind denying due process when guns are involved. I mind.

Two of the worst things about the Obama Administration are the severe setback his Presidency caused to race relations in America and the near complete mistrust he and his minions created in our Government employees' ability or desire to do the right thing. So I mind a lot about having a Government bureaucrat be able to rob me of my Second Amendment rights by fiat, without due process. All you have to do is think about the various conservative organizations who were singled out for different and far worse treatment by the IRS. You can think of the EPA turning the Animas river a putrid yellow a while back. You can think of the hundreds of Vets dying because the VA leadership and rank and file are so awful at their jobs. I absolutely don't trust our Government to do the right thing and I call on my fellow defenders of the Constitution to defeat on principal this lawless, unconstitutional proposal regarding one or another secret lists and the Second Amendment.

Wednesday, June 15, 2016

More Gun Ignorance at the Rolling Stone

Here's the title of the piece: Everything You Need to Know About the AR-15 Used in OrlandoHere's the truth. It wasn't an AR-15.

It was a SIG Sauer MCX. Except for some of the box magazines the MCX can use, there is not a piece on it that would fit and work on an AR-15. Not one.

Not an AR-15. Not an AR-15 clone. Not in any way an AR. So why talk about a gun that wasn't used? Rhetorical question. Because the anti-gun zealots know very little about, well, guns. They want to disparage the AR-15 so all semi-auto rifles are ARs to them. Morons.

I know they mention the real gun in the article, but it didn't start that way. Here's the proof.

Update and correction:This piece has been updated to reflect the name of the AR-15 model used in the shooting, and corrected to reflect fact that the Snapchat footage from the scene of the crime captured more than 20 shots fired in a single nine-second stretch, not a 90-second stretch. They're still getting it wrong the SIG is not an AR at all. They have it all wrong and they're sticking with it even as they say they are correcting things.

Hey, gun-hating "journalists", don't let the facts get in the way of your narrative. Whatever you do, please don't do that. That would break my heart.

Bad Constitutional Law Professors

Con Law professor, David Cohen, who teaches at a school I've never heard of, has taken off the liberal mask of "reasonable gun safety laws" and come out for repealing in total the Second Amendment. I appreciate his candor but he is a remarkably ignorant man. I'll show you below. But my answer is: Do it! Try to repeal the Second Amendment. I dare you. I double dog dare you. Make your presidential nominee support repeal. Make it a plank of your party's platform. Do it, you wuss.

Much more profoundly, the Framers and the Constitution were wildly wrong on race. They enshrined slavery into the Constitution in multipleways, including taking the extreme step of prohibiting the Constitution from being amended to stop the slave trade in the country's first 20 years. They also blatantly wrote racism into the Constitution by counting slaves as only 3/5 of a person for purposes of Congressional representation. It took a bloody civil war to fix these constitutional flaws (and then another 150 years, and counting, to try to fix the societal consequences of them).

When the Constitution was written, slavery existed throughout the World as it had since humans came into existence. Some of the northern states of our new nation banned slavery. The wealthy Democrat slave owners in the southern states thought they needed it for survival of their economy. The stuff about slavery in the Constitution was a compromise to get it passed. The 3/5 of a person compromise for counting slaves as part of the population, as any competent professor knows, was not racism on the part of the northern states' representatives writing the Constitution, but their non-racist desire to rid the whole country of slavery by not allowing a growing slave population to swell the representation of the slave states in the House and prevent (ultimately) the 13th Amendment. The struggle to make the 13th to 15th Amendments have real effect in society was a struggle against the racist Democrats who thought of the former slaves as Democrats think of black Americans now. Enshrine is not the right word for what the Constitution did with slavery. Seeded its doom is a more applicable phrase. What a wanker.

In the face of yet another mass shooting, now is the time to acknowledge a profound but obvious truth – the Second Amendment is wrong for this country and needs to be jettisoned. We can do that through a Constitutional amendment. It's been done before (when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed prohibition in the Eighteenth), and it must be done now.

And why, O sage, must it be jettisoned right freakin' now?

The Second Amendment needs to be repealed because it is outdated, a threat to liberty and a suicide pact.

And how is it a threat to liberty and a suicide pact?

When the Second Amendment was written, the Founders didn't have to weigh the risks of one man killing 49 and injuring 53 all by himself. Now we do, and the risk-benefit analysis of 1791 is flatly irrelevant to the risk-benefit analysis of today.

Oh, so because weapons have evolved since the Constitution is written, it has to go. But everything has modernized and things the drafters never contemplated have come into existence. So what? The Amendments enshrining our inalienable rights and prohibiting what the Government can do to us are not risk-benefit analyses but a recognition that we have God given rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness through property. I know that's from the Declaration but naming eternal freedoms was not risk-benefit analysis. It was principles. I wouldn't expect the Professor to recognize founding principles. We have a right to carry weapons because we have a right to protect our life from anyone trying to take it. It's really not that hard to grasp. You have to be really educated not to be able to see this.

But liberty is not a one way street. It also includes the liberty to enjoy a night out with friends, loving who you want to love, dancing how you want to dance, in a club that has historically provided a refuge from the hate and fear that surrounds you. It also includes the liberty to go to and send your kids to kindergarten and first grade so that they can begin to be infused with a love of learning. It includes the liberty to go to a movie, to your religious house of worship, to college, to work, to an abortion clinic, go to a hair salon, to a community center, to the supermarket, to go anywhere and feel that you are free to do to so without having to weigh the risk of being gunned down by someone wielding a weapon that can easily kill you and countless others.

What? If I carry a gun, I am not impeding anyone else's freedom. If I pull it and aim it someone else in order to murder them, then I'm impeding. And the person I aim at has the right to pull his or her own gun and shoot me first. It's OK to impede someone else's actions trying to murder you. That's a big part of the Second Amendment's reason of existence. So how is disarming the population going to make these places, these gun free zones, actually safe? I presume the Professor assumes that banning guns will get them out of the hands of the people who want to use them to murder others. Sorry, man, gun bans only disarm the law abiding. It never has and it never will disarm the criminal, because, and I know this will come as a shock to you, Professor, because criminals, by definition, don't obey laws banning guns. Any other proof, Prof?

Finally, if we take the gun-rights lobby at their word, the Second Amendment is a suicide pact. As they say over and over, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

Who does the Professor think stopped the murder spree of the miserable Islamic puke shooting for hours over a hundred people in the Pulse? He goes into a tired old Democrat talking point which has been completely debunked, namely, if we allow righteous citizens to carry guns for self defense, it will be a blood bath.

Just think of what would have happened in the Orlando night-club Saturday night if there had been many others armed. In a crowded, dark, loud dance club, after the shooter began firing, imagine if others took out their guns and started firing back. Yes, maybe they would have killed the shooter, but how would anyone else have known what exactly was going on? How would it not have devolved into mass confusion and fear followed by a large-scale shootout without anyone knowing who was the good guy with a gun, who was the bad guy with a gun, and who was just caught in the middle? The death toll could have been much higher if more people were armed.

Or, like in most actual good defensive use of guns against those intent on mass murder, only the killer is shot and he stops killing people because he's dead. I have about 40 examples of this. Does the Professor have any examples of the "worse" scenario of defensive use of guns? He doesn't give us anything but speculation. As he should know, that's not evidence.

The gun-rights lobby's mantra that more people need guns will lead to an obvious result — more people will be killed. We'd be walking down a road in which blood baths are a common occurrence, all because the Second Amendment allows them to be.

Told you he'd go there. Except he's 100% wrong. The murder rate in America, where murderers generally use handguns only, has dropped since 1993 by nearly half. What accounts for that? Two thing having a big impact are lengthy sentences for criminals and vastly easier to obtain concealed carry permits. It has been the opposite of what he ignorantly predicts. Far fewer people have been killed even though gun ownership during that time has nearly doubled. More guns, less murders; because there are more righteous citizens armed than there are armed murderers. Pretty simple to grasp, except for the learned Left. Yes, the Professor is a lefty. I looked it up.

So the solution to a bad man using a gun to kill people is to take away the guns from all the good people who would never use one to murder. Sounds like a good plan to me.
Wanker.

Monday, June 13, 2016

An Inordinate Fondness for Beetles

Atheist/scientist JBS Haldane said two things I particularly like. He suspected the Universe was not only stranger (he said queerer) than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. And in response to a Christian's statement that God had created all life and cared about it all equally, Haldane said that the species numbers would cause us to believe that God favored beetles over all other species.

Liberals are doing their usual after a horrible religion motivated shooting, namely, shielding the Muslim perpetrator by saying Americans are as much to blame as him and saying that banning the tools of the shooter, semi-automatic guns, is the only way to prevent these shootings. Most of the liberal knee-jerk rote reaction to the Pulse shooting is despicable. I'll just focus on one article and only one part of it.

[The Pulse shooting] is the type of killing that could happen anywhere in America. The shooter could be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Hindu, or atheist, motivated by intolerance, religious zealotry, mental disorder, or simply blind rage.

Yeah, I guess Hindu's or Catholics or Jews could have shot up the Pulse, but they didn't. Although it's correct to say the shooter could have been of any religion, there certainly seems to be a lot of Muslim mass murder lately. A whole lot.

I blame the shooter first and his religion's belief that gay people should be killed second. Because the guns he used are inanimate, blaming them is just stupid.

Thursday, June 09, 2016

Living a Life in Denial

The Australian Women's Soccer team members (they'd say football) are called the Matildas and the team, headed for the Olympics in Rio, is very good. So good that they are rated the 5th best woman's soccer team in the World and are picked by many as a team that will finish in the top 3.

A lot of species of life on Earth have very different sexes. This is called sexual dimorphism. Many mammals show it, think of the 3 to 4 ton bull elephant seals in the southern hemisphere versus the one ton female seals. That's an extreme example. But the human race has a very palpable sexual dimorphism, as the Maltildas found out in late May of this year.

There are very smart people, professors of Women's Studies in many well respected (kinda) Universities all over America who either don't know this, or pretend that it doesn't exist. They think there is absolutely no difference between men and women that is not mere social construct.

But you have to be really educated to be that ignorant. Or you have to live in denial about really obvious things.